In a corporate setting, the Microsoft Office Suite is an invaluable set of applications. One of Offices' biggest advantages is that its applications can work together to share information, produce reports, and so on. The problem is, there isn't much documentation on their cross-usage. Until now.

Introducing Integrating Excel and Access, the unique reference that shows you how to combine the strengths of Microsoft Excel with those of Microsoft Access. In particular, the book explains how the powerful analysis tools of Excel can work in concert with the structured storage and more powerful querying of Access. The results that these two applications can produce together are virtually impossible to achieve with one program separately.

But the book isn't just limited to Excel and Access. There's also a chapter on SQL Server, as well as one dedicated to integrating with other Microsoft Office applications. In no time, you'll discover how to:

Michael Schmalz

Michael Schmalz works in financial services and performs business and technology consulting in a variety of industries. He has done technical editing for O'Reilly on several Microsoft Office books and authored "Integrating Excel and Access" and "C# Database Basics". Michael has a degree in Finance from Penn State. He lives with his wife and children in Pennsylvania.

About the AuthorMichael Schmalz works in the financial services industry and also provides consulting services to a variety of industries. He specializes in Microsoft products, particularly the Microsoft Office Suite. Michael graduated with a B.S. in finance from Penn State and lives with his family in Pennsylvania.ColophonOur look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects.The animals on the cover of Integrating Excel and Access are common partridges (perdix cinerea or perdix perdix), one of several species known collectively as the gray partridge. A non-migratory game bird native to Europe, the gray partridge was introduced to North America when its numbers in Europe began to decline, and it is now common in the northern United States and southern Canada. The decline of the gray partridge in Europe is thought to be due to changes in European agricultural practices, such as the use of herbicides, rather than to overenthusiastic hunters.The gray partridge is a round, plump bird usually between a foot and a foot and a half long. The male has a mottled plumage of gray and brown, highlighted by a cinnamon-red face and throat and a distinctive horeshoe-shaped, chestnut-colored mark on his belly. The female looks similar but is duller in color, and her horseshoe patch may be lighter or smaller than the male's, or it may not show up at all. Once known simply as "the partridge," their name changed when the red-legged partridge became common-the "gray" was then added due to the color of their legs.Gray partridges live mainly on farmland and feed on grass and seeds, although chicks eat insects for the first few weeks of life. Their breeding season lasts from mid-April to early September, when the female may lay up to 20 eggs in her nest, also known as a clutch, which is usually hidden in a depression in the ground at the base of a hedge or a group of plants. The eggs hatch after almost a month, and both parents tend the chicks together. After the breeding season, they form larger groups called coveys.Despite the impression given in the holiday song "The Twelve Days of Christmas," gray partridges generally fly close to the ground and do not nest in trees. However, the male red-legged partridge apparently sat in pear trees and was commonly known in folklore to be lascivious, not unlike the way we think of rabbits today. Pear trees were involved in traditional celebrations of Twelfth Night, including wassailing of fruit trees and even fertility rituals, in which a maiden circled a pear tree backward to reveal her future husband's face within its branches. Perhaps these associations eventually helped "the partridge in the pear tree" work his way into the song.Reba Libby was the production editor and copyeditor for Integrating Excel and Access. Ann Atalla proofread the book. Colleen Gorman and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. John Bickelhaupt wrote the index.Karen Montgomery designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from Cassel's Natural History. Karen Montgomery also produced the cover layout with Adobe InDesign CS using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.David Futato designed the interior layout. This book was converted by Keith Fahlgren to FrameMaker 5.5.6 with a format conversion tool created by Erik Ray, Jason McIntosh, Neil Walls, and Mike Sierra that uses Perl and XML technologies. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano, Jessamyn Read, and Lesley Borash using Macromedia FreeHand MX and Adobe Photoshop CS. The tip and warning icons were drawn by Christopher Bing. This colophon was written by Reba Libby.The production editors for Book Title, eMatter Edition were Ellie Cutler and Jeff Liggett. Linda Walsh was the product manager. Kathleen Wilson provided design support. Lenny Muellner, Mike Sierra, Erik Ray, and Benn Salter provided technical support. This eMatter Edition was produced with FrameMaker 5.5.6.

Great book that really helps with pulling in Access data from Excel (or the other way). After a few hours of working with the examples and trying the methods using my own data, I have developed a macro that greatly speeds up a monthly chore, and it has opened my eyes to other analyses and time saving opportunities also.

Clearly the author approaches his subject from the Excel side in the first few chapters at least, and I concur with the opinion expressed that the title is therefore misleading. That the book should be awarded fewer stars on that basis alone is another matter.

After seeing one reviewer give the book one star because of his opinion that it had more excel than access emphasis, I had to write a review. I find this book outstanding in showing how to integrate the two. I am a very seasoned IT person but not so much with access and excel though I have written some VBA and Access apps lately. This book was just what I needed to develop an application using Access/Excel and Word.

As an Oracle/Unix person, I appreciate being able to read this book cover-to-cover and know how to write a relatively complex application I've been tasked with as one of my "other-related duties". Thanks for this lifesaver!

Nice book but the index is terrible! It doesn't cover the topics. Good grief ... 'link, 'span' and how many others are just not in the index. Time to get a good editor or just use a program that at least looks at the topics that are part of the book markup (now there's an idea ...).